by Scott Martin
‘Hop een,’ she said, opening her driver’s side door. I pulled at the door on the passenger’s side, caught off guard by the amount of effort required to open it. After a solid, feet-planted jerk, the metal door came reluctantly ajar and I climbed up onto the dark beige, polyester seat. She started the engine engendering the sound of a waking dragon (an unhappily waking dragon) and wasted no time in cutting her way into the throng of dilapidated vehicles slowly progressing down the road. In front of us, blue smoke spewed from the backs of rickety compact cars with rust stains peppering their paint like the spots of a giraffe. The pollution wafted into the air like a cloud of spray paint, mixing with that of the car in front of it to create a dark fog for us to cut through. I reached for the door, bracing my legs against the floor as Gail drove us over a pothole the size of a manhole cover.
‘Dutch?’ I asked as I fumbled my seatbelt into its buckle. The roads through Addis Ababa reminded me of the potholes back home – Wisconsin-after-a-rough-winter home, that is – only about one-hundred times worse. Cracks fractured the asphalt surfaces like the strands of a spider web and in places there seemed to be more holes than road. Unperturbed by any of this, Gail shot me a surprised glance and smiled.
‘Yees. How coult you tell?’ she asked, thankfully turning back to the road a moment later.
‘I’m familiar with the accent,’ I told her, readjusting my feet on the floor to get better traction. ‘I traveled to the Netherlands quite a bit in my days as a soccer player. I love the casual attitude of the people there and the country itself.’
‘Mmm,’ she replied, her voice carrying like a gentle breeze through the SUV. A sort of reverence came over her face; wistful and adoring. ‘Eet truly ees.’
We slipped into conversation about her homeland for a while, chatting amicably about Amsterdam, the countryside, and the history of soccer there. She navigated us through the pollution-laden streets of Ethiopia’s capital with the casual expertise of someone long-since acclimated to this way of life.
As we spoke, my vision meandered across our surroundings. I stared at the patchwork roofs of houses that seemed to sway on their miniscule plots of land; clusters of homes no bigger than the one Nadia’s foster family had lived in but in far worse condition. They accumulated in herds along sections of battered road, punctuated by the occasional tree or giant fern sprouting from between their inured depths like a malignant mole amongst a myriad of freckles. If parts of Romania are considered ‘poor’, then I have no words to describe the poverty I saw in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
We passed vans used as buses which were so over laden with passengers that the rear bumper would thud against the road with each pothole. I forced myself not to gape at the people crammed between the smeared or broken windows in an indistinguishable jumble of limbs as we passed, but something deep in my chest clenched unbearably at the thought of such penury.
More than once we passed what I could only assume were victims of the military skirmishes in Ethiopia. They scooted along the side of the road on flat, wooden carts with four contorted wheels just round enough to rotate. What little remained of their legs protruded from their hips like thumbs. I watched the first one we came upon as he used a long wooden stick – likely once the handle for a broom – to paddle his way along the road, bouncing over pothole and debris alike. To the second amputee we saw, a gaunt man in an oversized t-shirt which obscured any leg he may have had, I gave the kindness of disregard and turned to Gail, instead.
‘So what brought you here?’ I asked now that our musings of the Netherlands were running out.
She gave a sigh and slight shrug as she brushed a hair from her face. ‘I just vanted to go vherre I was neeted.’
‘And they need you here,’ I said, not asking but agreeing.
‘I like to sink so. Eet’s a rough place but full offf goot people just trying to get by.’ She glanced out her side window as she said this. I wondered what she saw when she looked upon these ravished streets. At some point did you stop seeing the plumes of smoke rising from the other vehicles like the tail feathers of a bird? Or the homes built with slabs of whatever material was on hand, slapped together as little more than lean-tos? Or the people, weather-beaten and haggard, with huge, brown eyes that could peer at you so sharply one minute then turn blindly to the road ahead the next? How long would it take for such sights to become mundane?
‘How is the government here?’ I asked, curious to know what the bureaucracies were doing for their people.
‘Eet coult be better,’ she admitted, wincing at some intimate knowledge. ‘Corruption ees a big concern. Dee officials siphoning money from exports to – how do you say eet in America? Line deir pockets?’ I smiled, feeling a cold in the pit of my stomach, and nodded.
‘Yes. Exactly. And all the while the people go hungry.’
‘Yees. Eet ees very unfortunate.’ We dropped into silence for a moment; a brief period of depressed and disappointed reverie, until Gail made a thoughtful noise and asked, ‘Have you heard of any new efforts to help with AIDS, perhaps?’
She glanced at me with such hopefulness I almost couldn’t bear to speak the truth. ‘No, nothing much that I hear. It doesn’t help that Bush is in office.’
‘Hm.’ She turned back to the road with a resigned sigh. ‘I see.’ After another pause she seemed to forcefully shake the dismay from her countenance and changed the subject to distant concerns. ‘Ant how are sings in Amereeca?’
I smirked at her and shook my head. ‘Eh, Bush is beginning to receive criticism for entering Iraq. Gas prices are rising. But the pizza’s still good.’ She laughed and peeked at me briefly to gauge my sincerity. I winked at her and told her the story of my Burger from Hell earlier that morning.
~~~
By the time we had passed our third cart-riding amputee, I could no longer harbor any insecurity about my robotic hands. As we turned onto a side street lined on one side with a patch of neglected greenery which seemed to serve as a park and more ramshackle houses on the other, I had relaxed into a new reprieve of self-assurance.
Layla House seemed to take up most of the block. The sagging, pastiche homes quickly gave way to a long, walled compound made of houses in significantly better condition. Painted the bright hews of blue and red I had seen in Kathy’s photographs, they peeked over the grey wall like children peering out of their playpen. Gail turned off the road with a thud as we plunked over a curb-lined ditch to face a long, metal fence. She honked and waved to a man dressed in black-and-dark-green camouflage with a black Poorboy hat pulled low over his brow. He lifted one hand from the assault rifle he held across his chest like a sash and waved in return before striding across the driveway to open the gate.
My son is living in a gated compound with armed guards, I thought and swallowed through a sand-paper throat. Whatever the man and his gun said about this dour side of Addis Ababa in which Layla House resided, I quickly decided I was thankful for the precautions they were taking with these children – and with my child. The grey brick-and-mortar wall abruptly became a comfort at my back as Gail navigated us across the lumpy concrete. I leaned forward to glimpse the gate in the side view mirror, watching as it was slid closed by the expert hands of the gunman.
We drove past a white building with a red brick chimney on our left. Gail gestured out her window, commenting, ‘That ees our office, dining hall, ant video room for ven vee haff movies to show.’ She turned alongside the building and put the Land Rover in park. ‘They are out of date, of course, but dee children love Disney movies.’
I nodded in understanding and opened my mouth to comment, but she had already begun climbing out of the SUV. The door creaked objectionably as she swung it wide then slammed it shut behind her. I hastily unbuckled myself to follow her around the back of the Land Rover.
‘I weel show you around for a bit, den we can find Michias. Okay?’
‘That would be great.’ I started pacing alongside her. I wanted to take it all in, this place that Michi
as called home. ‘Please don’t keep me from anything,’ I said as I lifted the camera I had draped around my neck. ‘I’m not someone that you need to impress or worry that you may turn off. This is where my son lives.’
She nodded sharply and, gauging by the slight upward curve to her lips, respected what I had said. We passed a bright blue building with a red line painted along its base..
‘We do dee best we can vith vhat we have.’ She waved her arms in a vague, all-encompassing gesture.
We were approaching a building no bigger than a tool shed from which wiry lines of rope had been strung and clothes hung. Two boys, one in his mid-teens and the other no older than Nadia’s five years were laughing, bent over something in a corner too shady for me to see. As we drew nearer I saw that across from the small shed was a lean-to made of sheet metal built around the long trunk of a grey tree. A pile of old tractor tires were scattered in front of it, lying over a layer of broken rubble that was probably the remnants of when the wall was built.
Waste not, I thought as I eyed a set of unpainted, metal monkey bars, rusting and held together with twine. A yellow-and-purple plaid blanket was flung over the top as if to create a patch of shade below, a function it wasn’tt accomplishing very well at this midday hour.
I peered at the boys as we drew nearer. They were playing with a couple stones, giggling, as they squatted by what I now saw was a small doorway into the shed-like building. It was such a small opening, I almost felt overzealous in calling it a door and not a window, but the boys could have slipped inside if they’d chosen to. I supposed in a compound of children, it was a door.
‘Eet’s lunch time for dee children,’ Gail said as she led me around to the other side of the squat building where a more adult-sized door was propped open by a portly clay pot. We were instantly assaulted by a gust of hot, smoky air as we stepped into the adumbral interior of the building.
In the middle of the room, a woman in a blousy green dress with white daisies smattered across it and a pink scarf tied over her hair was squatting beside an open fire. She had a large bowl of some light brown batter beside her left knee and was holding a flat, round pan constructed like a circular griddle over the edge of the fire as she slowly rotated a layer of the batter across the pan’s surface. I watched, mesmerized as her wiry arms dipped frightfully close to the flames. Her arms never once wavered in their motion until the batter coated the entire pan. When it was finished, at which time she rested the pan with its crepe-like concoction atop a rack over the fire pit.
‘She ees making injera, a traditional bread of Ethiopia,’ Gail explained, her eyes fixed on the woman by the fire. ‘Eet ees a mixture of a grain, water, salt, and oil. They use eet to scoop their food.’
I glanced back to the elderly woman in time to see her carefully lower a lid over the pan. A few moments later, she lifted the lid and tenderly pinched one of the curled corners of the injera to pull it onto a blue and yellow woven plate much like a hot pad. She set the flat, pancake-like bread aside and the process began again.
Behind her, another woman was collecting the cooled injera and rolling them like carpets to be stacked on yet another of these colorful, woven plates. When a pyramidal pile had accumulated on a plate, she set it in the hobbit-sized doorway on the other side of the hut where it was promptly retrieved by the two boys.
‘Shall vee go find Michias?’ Gail asked, indicating the door with an open arm. A part of me wanted to stay, too fascinated by the cooking process to leave, but it was minute in comparison to the part of me which longed to see my son.
‘Absolutely,’ I told her and turned to duck out the door. I trailed behind Gail as she wound her way back to the white building with a red chimney. Inside, we emerged into a narrow hallway with pea-green walls and another border of red paint along its base. As we turned into the first room off this hallway, my eyes fell on Michias.
He was sitting at one corner of a wooden table accompanied by six other children about his age. They each had plates covered with three different, saucy-looking dishes: one a golden brown; one yellow and clearly a derivative of corn; and one a dark, succulent green. A plate of the rolled injera sat in the middle of the table with only a few rolls of the bread still remaining. All around the table, the kids were using the injera like tortillas to scoop the food off their plates, pinching chunks of this or that between torn-off pieces of the fluffy wrap and stuffing it into their mouths.
They glanced at Gail and me a little suspiciously, but were too intent on eating to pay us much mind as we hovered in the background of their meal. I could barely see the other children with Michias so close. He eyed me with the same expression I had seen in many of his pictures: the watchful uncertainty that held a tender note of confusion and hope. If he recognized me from the photograph we had sent, he gave no sign of it. Like the adoring and sentimental parent I was, I felt perfectly content to simply stand there in his near vicinity and watch him eat every dollop of food, snapping a picture of his distrustful gaze for memento’s sake.
When he had finished and was beginning to wriggle out from behind the table, Gail called out something in Amharic, issuing a quick barrage of sharp consonants and short vowels, the only part of which I was able to discern being Michias’s name. He looked at her, wide-eyed, his mouth slightly parted, then slowly tottered over to us.
39
The Mariners Cap
Gail took us back to the bright blue building with red trim inside of which were enclosed a series of dim rooms branching off from an even dimmer central hallway. I followed her and Michias into the first room on our right Beige carpet with green geometric designs in the rough shape of turtles’ backs covered the floor; a red, yellow, and green rainbow was painted across a bright blue background on the far wall; eight bunk beds lined the walls – sixteen beds in all – and a small chest of blankets and toys nestled in the far corner. This was Michias’s room..
I scanned the small crowd of children presently gathered there. A group of six boys I gauged to be in their early to mid-teens were clustered in the far corner, splayed across bunk beds or posed nearby in calculatingly casual stances. One elbow resting on a headboard or footboard, legs crossed and hips cocked, they stood wavering in the mock confidence of the pubescent. Behind us was another group: three boys all nearer Michias’s age, clustered together as they took surreptitious peeks at the older boys in the opposite corner.
Amharic is a very difficult language, so I couldn’t understand any of the words Michias was murmuring to Gail. She had told him that I would like to be his father and was here to take him home to America, to ‘hees new home of a mother, a sister, and a brother – dee family in dee photo,’ to which he had stared blankly at his feet. I wasn’t bothered by his lackadaisical response to my introduction. This was a child who had watched both his birth parents wither away and die at the merciless hands of AIDS; concepts of fatherhood were unlikely to be synonymous with amorous feelings.
Gail straightened from her stooped posture bent over Michias’s head as he spoke now, and looked to me. ‘He says dat another boy has taken hees Mariners baseball cap.’
I looked at Michias, who was watching the both of us expectantly, waiting for a response to his admission. When his eyes tracked back to me, I held his gaze and said, ‘Let’s get your cap.’
A smile flickered on Gail’s lips. ‘Dat may be goot to build trust between you.’ She turned to Michias.
I didn’t need words to understand when my son pointed at one of the older boys across the room. He appeared to be at least fifteen. As I strode into his vicinity he shot a glance my way: a flash of fear quickly masked by defiance. I locked my eyes on his round face, a bobble atop his stick-figure torso with hair shaved nearly to the scalp. He wore a faded blue shirt and shorts which ended a few inches shy of his knees.
‘Can you understand English?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ He eyed me with an upward tilt to his chin. Ignoring the boys around him who had gone wide-eyed and silent, I
moved forward and stepped to within inches of his face. I saw the cold confidence in his eyes falter when he realized he could no longer even attempt to look down his nose at me. His pride prevented him from backing away, though, so I spoke into his face in a calm, quiet voice as he stared up at me.
‘Give. My son. His hat.’
He pursed his lips and for a second I worried he would force me to go farther. This isn’t about you, I silently vowed. This is me and my son. Please don’t get in the way. I had only wanted enough of a scene to make Michias proud and hadn’t decided how far I was actually willing to go.
I stared hard into the boy’s slanted eyes, willing him to give in and not make this a bigger issue than it needed to be. His eyes flicked to over my right shoulder where Michias waited beside Gail. I stayed where I was, nose-to-nose, barely breathing, until he slid half a step back then reached for the mattress of the top bunk nearest us. Tracking his movements with my eyes, I watched one wiry hand slide between the bunk and the bed then snake its way back out, a smashed, navy baseball cap now clutched in its grasp.
With a flighty glance at my face, he moved around me and deposited the cap in the hands of my son. I swiveled on my feet, waiting until the exchange had occurred, then made my way back to Michias and Gail. The boy shuffled back to his friends, his head stubbornly held aloft but eyes watching the floor before his feet. He didn’t meet my eyes as we passed each other, but Michias did. He looked up to smile at me as he put his Mariners cap back on.
‘Mariners,’ I said, beaming at my son, Andy Martin. ‘Seattle Mariners.’
Andy’s grin broadened and I reached down to push the bill of the hat playfully. As we left the room, Gail turned left but pointed us to the right and out the other side of the building.
